BT and NTL suffer customers' wrath

PHONE companies NTL and BT have come bottom of a customer satisfaction survey. Just 21% of the 532 NTL customers questioned said they were "very satisfied" with overall service. Of the 854 BT customers questioned for the Which? consumer magazine report, 29% said they were "very satisfied".

PHONE companies NTL and BT have come bottom of a customer satisfaction survey released today.

Just 21% of the 532 NTL customers questioned said they were "very satisfied" with overall service.

Of the 854 BT customers questioned for the Which? consumer magazine report, 29% said they were "very satisfied".

Utility Warehouse and One.Tel topping the overall satisfaction table for companies which provided line rental and calls.

Call 18866 was the best calls-only provider, with 81% of the 156 customers questioned saying they were "very satisfied".

Which? carried out an online survey of 4,745 people in May this year.

Respondents were asked to rate their home phone suppliers on their customer service, their billing and their overall level of satisfaction with the provider.

NTL customers reported the worst customer service, with only 10% saying they were very satisfied.

One respondent told Which? that NTL's answering service was a "maze", adding: "You disappear into the system, sometimes never to reappear."

Billing

NTL and BT received the worst reports when it came to billing. One respondent described BT's bills as "incomprehensible", Which? said.

More than three quarters of respondents who had switched phone company told Which? that they had saved as much or more money than they expected.

Which? editor Malcolm Coles said: "There's never been a better time to switch home phone suppliers.

"There's no good reason to stick with BT or NTL if you're not happy - there are more choices than ever and prices are dropping all the time."

The Which? survey includes companies for which it received 30 customer responses or more.

Phone companies providing line and calls received the following "very satisfied" rating by customers who were asked about their overall satisfaction. The number of respondents per company appears in brackets.

1. Utility Warehouse - 62% (78)

2. One.Tel 54% (705)

3. Kingston 49% (49)

4. British Gas (in conjunction with One.Tel) 45% (53)

5. Homecall 45% (132)

6. Telewest 41% (478)

7. BT 29% (854)

8. NTL 21% (532)

Responding to the Which? survey, Gavin Patterson, BT consumer managing director, said: "It's hard to think of a more misleading survey - riddled with assumptions, half-stories, and out-of-date pricing. Which? didn't give us the opportunity to respond or we'd have told them why."

Mr Patterson said the survey's sample size was too small to be credible. He added that BT's own third party survey of 25,000 customers showed 54% of its customers were very satisfied with BT and only 5% were dissatisfied.

Switching

Switching from BT to another supplier does not necessarily save customers' money, Mr Patterson said.

He added: "It's also not true that customers will necessarily get better service elsewhere. A recent survey conducted by uSwitch rated BT third for customer service out of 28 competitors.

"Also, Which? fails to mention that Call 18866 - the so-called leader on calls - can only be contacted by email. We believe that customers like to speak to a human - via a free help desk, like BT's. It's surely laughable to suggest that unhappy customers should only be able to complain on email?"

NTL PR director Malcolm Padley said the company was "very disappointed" with the Which? report.

"We don't believe it fairly represents the views of our two million telephone customers. NTL offers great value for money and our own in-depth research and minute by minute tracking of our own network shows that our customers receive a reliable and high quality product," he said.

NTL said the quoted survey was not comparing like with like and questioned the validity of the overall customer satisfaction survey.